The quote in the title was an interesting comment from my LinkedIn Marketing Solutions client Joshua Graff which really got me thinking about why brands would and debatably should use professional networking platform LinkedIn over social networking site Facebook to market their brands.

Facebook can of course sometimes be a good forum for brands to engage with customers, but it isn’t always. Research and my personal experience shows that people primarily use Facebook to be sociable, whether that is organising your Saturday night plans or messaging old friends users are in different frame of mind to when they log on to LinkedIn where they go to search for jobs, make business decisions and primarily to gain insight – 85% of members.

LinkedIn is arguably a more professional and safe place for brands – whether they are consumer or commercial – to engage with customers. It offers marketers a powerful audience of educated and affluent business influentials (80% of decision makers being on LinkedIn). 42,000 of the Business Elite in Europe (BE Europe) visit LinkedIn everyday creating a forum where business decisions are made. Marketers can also gain really rich data about their followers, for example how senior they are, how much their average income is etc.

Be great to get other people’s opinions on the benefits/pitfalls of these two social platforms for businesses -so tell me what do you think?

Twitter’s growth has been about amplification of opinions, influence and conversations. At times this has made it appear more like broadcasting and certainly it has made the conversation louder, shorter and less genteel. Yet in interacting with media and blogs I would argue that twitter is amplifying and sharing ideas that often start in long form in other media platforms. This is different from broadcasting although it does make the conversation less sophisticated in many cases. I would describe it as a broader conversation rather than a broadcast.

Indeed as twitter grows its ability to amplify grows too so amplifying the amplifier. Some bloggers who began as highly focused ‘Influentials’ talking to only niche groups have become stars and engaged in very broad conversations. They often start to post less frequently but when they do they reach bigger, much bigger numbers.

The post pointed out that now more people get news from the Internet than traditional newspapers. This too is a part of the amplification process with e-zines merging with communities and a more dialogue driven view of the news. The key dynamic here is the way twitter helps ideas and stories leapfrog between niche communities. Again this seems to be of the great strengths of twitter it takes news from niches and can make them part of a broad community.

As it grows this does not mean twitter is all about these broader conversations. Clearly there a niche areas such as middle aged cycling that have drawn together quite large but discrete groups who don’t make it as trending topics. But even these conversations have become broader. So back to the blindingly obvious not always being easy to adopt I quote one point in the Elise’s Review below:

If Your Blog Doesn’t Have A “Tweet This” Or “Like This” Button On It, It Means That You Are Not Cool.